IN nothing, more than in his attitude toward nature, does the modern betray himself. Ours is the questioning age, the truth-seeking, the scientific age; when, for illustration, Maeterlinck laid his philosophy by to observe with infinite pains the habits of the bee and to record, without the intrusion of too many deductions, the amazing facts as nature passed them in review before his eyes,—he became the naturalist-philosopher, selling days, not for speculations, but for laws. To the poet also has come the desire which came to the philosopher to demonstrate the truth within the beauty; to penetrate to the finer law at the heart of things; in short, there has arisen what one may term the poet-naturalist, and in the recent work of Mr. Madison Cawein we have perhaps the most characteristic illustration among our own poets of the younger school, of this phase of nature-interpretation.
Before considering it, however, one must trace briefly Mr. Cawein’s evolutionary steps
through the haunted ways of nature in its imaginative and romantic phases, which enthralled him first, by no means wholly, but predominantly, and of which he has left many records in his volume, Myth and Romance. Of the more artistic poems, worthy to be put in comparison with his later work, there are several from the opening group of the collection, as these picturesque lines containing the query:
What wood-god, on this water’s mossy curb,
Lost in reflection of earth’s loveliness,
Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb?
I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess,
Came on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame
Of buds and blooms, the season writes its name.—
Ah me! could I have seen him ere alarm